Olusoga: humanities risk becoming ‘ornaments’ on curricula

The humanities risk becoming “ornaments” on science-focused university course portfolios as they take a “disproportionate” hit from the UK sector funding crisis, public historian David Olusoga has warned.

Delivering the National Humanities Lecture at the University of London, Olusoga warned that more pain was likely on the way after announcements in recent weeks that included Cardiff University’s decision to scrap degrees including ancient history, music, and religion and theology.

“Last week as you would have seen was a bad week for higher education. There are more bad weeks ahead. But repeatedly over recent years, a disproportionate amount of the bad news has landed on the desks of those who teach and administer in the humanities,” said the professor of public history at the University of Manchester.

Olusoga highlighted Canterbury Christ Church University’s decision last year to scrap its degree in English literature as “ironic”, meaning “it will soon no longer be possible to study English literature in the same city Aphra Behn and Christopher Marlowe were born [in]; the city to which Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrims trudge in The Canterbury Tales”. 

A recent survey of 66 universities by the Royal Historical Society found that 39 history departments have reported staff cuts since 2020, while 32 universities had reported the loss of history degrees or courses.

Olusoga said that, while some students “are choosing to walk away from the humanities,” there was “so often a notable difference in responses and reactions particularly among journalists and politicians to the closure of humanities courses”. 

“Some sciences are facing challenges of their own, but they are rarely in the same ways that the humanities are expected to justify their relevance or make a utilitarian case for their very existence,” he said.

Quoting the feminist writer Judith Butler, he said that the “current direction of travel” risked that “humanities will become occasional ornaments for curricula based more profitably in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics”.

But there is an “unacknowledged and unrecognised enthusiasm for the humanities in everyday life”, he said, highlighting that the rise of genealogy and the popularity of websites including Ancestry demonstrate a public appetite for involvement in the humanities. 

He described that at the age of 25 he decided to walk away from education, to avoid ending up “a greying, middle aged history professor giving long lectures in a suit and tie”. But his “attempts to escape destiny” amounted to an “Oedipus level of failure”. 

He did not, however, “want to walk away from history”: “What I wanted to do was to try to make history in the ways that I’d encountered it as a child that had made me fall in love with history, which was watching it on television,” said Olusoga, the presenter of popular BBC documentaries including A House Through Time and Black and British: A Forgotten History.

Pivotal to his engagement with history and the humanities as a child were the BBC and free public museums that were funded through grants and subsidies, and he said that his aim now was to “make the case for the humanities, not just in higher education, but particularly public history”.

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com